Wealth – Page 8 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Big Short – The Next Step Down

“Our investment-strategy was simple. People hate to think about bad things happening so they always underestimate their likelihood.” – The Big Short

If you live in a haunted house, you’re not alone.

I watched The Big Short the other night. It’s about the financial system and the shenanigans that led to the near collapse of the Western financial world, but presented with elements of light-hearted comedy, so, of course I enjoyed it. And having Margot Robbie sitting in a bubble bath describing mortgage-backed securities, subprime loans, and credit default swaps while drinking champagne was genius.

The premise of the movie is that several groups of people figured out that the housing market was fraudulent, and that any human with a heartbeat (and, as described in the movie, at least one dog) could borrow enough money to buy a house.

Why not? House prices only go up.

I’m no Margot Robbie, but when I’m naked in the bathroom, at least the shower gets turned on.

There have been many people who have done excellent pieces describing the sheer insanity of the housing market and the incestuous relationships between the lenders and rating agencies that kept the party going with cheap money far too long. You can read them, but they don’t feature a picture of Margot Robbie in a bathtub.

In my personal experience, a bank that rhymes with Hells Rarmo offered me a loan for over six times my annual income with only my stated salary as the basis. My response, “You know, I could never afford to pay that back. Why would you offer a loan that big to me?”

“I know, but I’m required to tell you about it,” was the answer from the uncomfortable voice on the other end. Even I could see the con from there, especially since they offered to lend me my downpayment.

The next home loan I got (after the collapse, in 2009) required enough personal information from me that I had to hire a proctologist to help me fill out the paperwork.

What’s a three-letter word that starts with gas? Car.

The result of the Great Recession that followed was a retooling of the industry, bankers and people from the ratings agencies went to prison for fraud, and the government decided to create a system of sound money so these sorts of manias were tamed. Okay, you can laugh now, because none of that really happened.

The government just shoved so much money down the throats of the banks that they got even richer for manipulating the system in ways that would make Al Capone’s scar twitch.

What I saw during the run up to the disaster is that the economic taint (heh heh, I said taint) from the housing bubble spilled everywhere. The place I noticed it first was that waitresses became worse. Why? During the bubble, everyone upgraded their job, and good, smart waitresses became, (spins wheel) mortgage brokers and realtors. The mark of a really good economy is crappy customer service.

She don’t lie, she don’t lie . . . romaine.

I wrote a couple of weeks back about how I can see this happening in restaurants locally here:

The Invisible Recession

People are hurting, and the first thing to cut are the luxuries. Some people take eating out at McDonald’s© as a luxury versus heating up leftover lasagna, and now they’re bringing the lasagna. Garfield® would be proud, but McDonald’s® rarely makes money from cartoon cats.

Add in gasoline prices that are so high they make prescription drugs look cheap, and the squeeze is here. CarMax© just recently announced that they’ve taken a 10% hit last quarter in number of cars sold. People don’t buy cars when they’re worried about choosing between day-old lasagna and a McChicken™ sandwich.

At least one of you will enjoy this one.

The biggest tension in The Big Short came from the fact that the guys who saw the fraud went all-in. In one case, Micheal Burry put $1.3 billion into “insurance policies” that would pay multiples of the invested amount if the mortgages bonds started collapsing the way that Burry was sure that they would.

Burry made a $1.3 billion bet, and on top of that, he had to pay monthly premiums in the millions to keep the policy in force. Yet, even as the housing market started to fail, the housing bonds weren’t failing. If those bonds didn’t start falling Burry and his fund would be buried. John Maynard Keynes famously said that “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,” proving that he was at least occasionally right.

Economics jokes are like bank bailouts. Most people don’t get them.

They did fail, and Burry made his investors rich, just in the nick of time before his fund became insolvent. Burry (according to rumors) ended up making over $800 million during the financial crisis.

All this brings us to where we are today. I might be wrong, but what I’m seeing everywhere I look are people that are at the end of their rope. The reason? Because we never took the pain and we didn’t clean up the financial system and make it a servant rather than a master.

But I have a plan. Maybe Margot Robbie could explain our way out of this one?

The Kids Aren’t Alright: Mental Health

“Who is Poppy Adams? After graduating Harvard Business School, Adams was briefly held for serious mental health issues before disappearing without a trace.” – Kingsman: The Golden Circle

Every day I tell my family I’m going out for a jog and then I don’t. It’s my longest running joke.

FYI – minimal humor and memes in today’s post due to subject matter – it just didn’t fit.

We’ve driven the kids nuts.

I don’t necessarily mean you or I, but the change in society has caused a great decline in the mental health of the kids. It really started showing up in 2009 or so, when the emergency room visits for kids started a sharp uptrend. The kids (ages 10-19) were going to the hospital due to self-harm spiked by over 60% in a single decade.

For girls it was worse – it spiked nearly 100% – doubling in that time period. The rates of depression doubled in that time frame as well.

What I’ve seen when I talk to kids is that many, many of them have huge anxiety issues. Many are on psychoactive drugs. Many are visiting therapists regularly.

I look back to when I was that age, and I’m not sure I knew even a single Gen X kid who was seeing a shrink. I’m sure that it wouldn’t have been something they’d have shared, but it was a school, so that would have gotten around. Also, as far as I know, there was only one girl on any medication, and as I recall there had been some significant family tragedy.

Suicide? Only one kid tried it in the decade I spent in that age group. And I knew a lot of kids. But, to be fair, something like 30% of kids with mental health issues drop out of school so I never would have seen them. However, the numbers really do show that this is certainly the most mentally ill generation in the history of the country.

What’s changed?

Luxuries are available today that would have boggled the minds of my generation when we were growing up. Kids today can talk to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Listen to any song. Watch concerts of their favorite bands. Yet, with all the information, connection, and amusement available, something is horribly wrong.

My first guess at a major factor is a simple one – the iPhone™ came out in 2007. Given two years for smart phones to become more or less everywhere among the teen set, that correlates pretty well to the start of the increase in mental issues.

The designers of social media and games aren’t stupid – they absolutely manipulate the way the apps work to make the user addicted. “Someone read my FaceGram© or InstaSpace® and liked it! I’ll go check and see who it was! I Tweeted®, er X’d™. Did someone repost it?” The system is designed to make sure there are small, frequent doses of dopamine kicked out by whatever is in the human brain that kicks out dopamine.

This shorter-term focus, the smaller “bite size” ideas make something that was typical decades ago, like reading a book, seem like forever. Not being able to tune out and relax can’t be good.

Social media also has another insidious function – it is designed so people show off only the glamorous and nice things that happen to them. Who spends a lot of time posting about their pain, and sorrow? In the end, it makes a certain segment of the population feel that everyone is doing great except for them. Me? With my friends we spend as much time talking about the rough bits in our life as we do the great things.

Online friendships are also shallower, so the real bonding that kids get when they’re on adventures is lost. Add in that porn of the vilest types is available to most any kid with a phone? How are they not messed up in ways that no other generation has ever been?

2009 was also the dawn of Obama. Obama started defending traditional marriage and ended in full Pride® mode. Gender confusion wasn’t really something that was very big when I was growing up, except for Dee Snider. Now people are talking about transitioning toddlers, and somehow these people are being taken seriously and not being strung up on telephone poles.

To be sure, not all kids are a mess, but enough are that there’s a very big problem – I’ve seen one statistic that 44% of high school students feel persistent sadness or hopelessness. That’s a big number – I do think that, perhaps, the kids see some of the same things coming that we do – I do know they look at the economy and think, perhaps correctly, that they’ll never do as well as their parents.

I’m not sure how to fix those millions of kids that have already passed through their teens and are now in their 20s. From the outside, the one thing I’ve seen with most psychiatrists/psychologists is that they never really cure their patients, they just keep coming back, week after week to pay for the therapist’s BMW®. And I’m exceptionally skeptical of many psychoactive drugs. Yes, I know that some of them work very, very well for certain conditions with a physical cause.

What now?

The solutions to preventing a lot of these issues in the first place are fairly simple, but a big step for many:

Religion gives life a greater meaning. I’m pretty sure it’s not a coincidence that as church attendance declines, mental health problems increase.
Be involved.
Technology control (i.e., limit the damn phones), especially for young girls who seem to be more impacted.
Remove the gender confusion – homeschooling or a decent religious school would be good options.
Make sure they learn skills that allow them to be useful. Start small, and build up. Don’t coddle them or walk them through every step. Make them work for it.
Make sure the boys are involved in sports, especially if they don’t want to be. Get girls involved in something like 4-H or the church youth club.

The Zoomers (Gen Z) have had a tough time of it, and this will be another factor (along with their horribly messed up dating and sex lives) that is already impacting the economy.

Let’s not screw up another generation.

The Kids Aren’t Alright: Sex

“I don’t know much about geopolitics, but that is one cool name for a country: Chad.” – Norm Macdonald Live

Ever notice you never see Chad with Chad in Chad? Hmmm.

Technological change has been very difficult for the kids of today – it has changed entirely the way that they relate to each other, how they spend their time, how they are rewarded, and the very nature of the male-female relationship. Since I’m writing this post, it’s about as positive as Biden’s impact on the economy.

Of course, technology had changed the way that previous generations lived. When I was a kid, our entertainment on a Friday night was cruising main. We’d get in cars, and ride up and down the street, listening to loud music, revving engines.

Why?

To see each other. To find out what was going on. To meet girls. The girls would go to meet guys and chatter and drink some occasional peppermint schnapps snuck into a Big Gulp® cup. Often the girls and boys would do no more than flirt. Sometimes, though, well, more would happen.

This was an in-person interaction that was natural. The technology of the car and cruising Main were just minor adaptations of behavior that was certainly as old as the concept of the very first city – boys wanting to watch girls, and girls wanting to be watched.

Does mentioning cruising Main make you feel old yet?

This in-person interaction gave us the dopamine hits of the day. And, even at the breakneck speed of 25 miles an hour, there was an absolute limit to the number of boys a girl could see in a night of cruising Main of, maybe, a few dozen.

The reality is, of course, that we all have a finite number of choices of people to date (and mate) with. Cruising Main was a dance that was as old as time. In this dance, the woman offered her youth and beauty in return for the commitment of a good man. The man offered his commitment for the youth and beauty of a woman. And, when I was much younger, if I stayed up late enough I could watch it all on Cinemax® after my parents were asleep.

Those trades are, generally, good trades. They create a stable society, and provide a woman the chance to find, marry, have children with a man and raise them. Women tend to try to date and mate upwards in socio-economic status. Men? Well, you know.

Hey, derpy girls need love, too.

Now, for many, the meeting place is Tinder©. In Tinder™, women have infinite choices – they are the commodity to be possessed, and they swipe left or right, alternately accepting or rejecting hundreds of men in a minute. In this new bargain, the woman now trades her youth and beauty for endless one-night stands with Chad Tinderchuck. Example:

Chad always has a date, since girls always swipe to talk to him. In this, Chad ruins women. Chad’s a 10, but when it’s 2am at the bar, Chad’s fine with the average 4 or 5 or 6. In this way, that 4 (Flora Foura) thinks that, for the rest of her life, she deserves a Chad Tinderchuck in the prime of his life. She is a widow, forever pining for that man that she thinks she deserves. Don’t believe me?

Wait, is that a lunch lady from 1983? And she’s calling anyone mediocre???

The actual 5 or 6 guy Flora should be with? Well, after Chads marry and disappear, and younger Chads start ignoring her, she’s ready to “settle” for that 5 or 6 Andy Average. And, she’s angry about it every day that she sees Andy, since, deep down, Flora knows that she’s good enough for Chad.

But we’re seeing now that Andy Average isn’t quite so interested in Flora Foura after she’s spent her twenties on a revolving carousel of men, maybe picking up a child or two.

Let’s be fair – most of the things that most men do (especially young men) is to get quality females. If those aren’t available, Andy Average shuts down. Why work overtime when Xbox® is cheap? Why pump iron when Flora puts him on ignora?

¡Jeb! is always on ignora.

Men then go NEET – Not in Employment Education or Training. Why work hard? Why try to get great education? Why work at all? One segment of men has gone beyond MGTOW – they’ve gone full NPNW. I’ll let you sort out what NPNW means.

And who can blame men? When I was in high school, women liked men taking charge. Men were supposed to try, and women were supposed to put up a struggle so they didn’t feel like tramps. To be clear, I never engaged in any behavior that the young fräulein didn’t enthusiastically support, and when she said “stop” and meant it, I did.

It was well ingrained in women that they didn’t want to look like tramps, so they had to pretend they didn’t like or want to make out. Meat Loaf’s song trilogy Paradise by the Dashboard Light is a perfect description of a healthy sexual dynamic of the type that produced . . . me, and probably you, too.

We now live in a world of #MeToo. Russell Brand (who I don’t know because he doesn’t return either my emails or my calls) is being accused of, hear me out, having sex with (really!) a girl who wanted to have sex with him, who was (drumroll) of legal age. The cad! If a multimillionaire celebrity can be accused and lose a couple of million dollar a year of income for doing legal things, well, what chance does Andy Average have, especially since the average woman don’t need no man?

This is, perhaps the biggest lie. Women who don’t have children or a husband in their 40s are, perhaps, the unhappiest demographic on the planet. And, as I noted earlier, women want to marry up. The big paradox is women want to get a college degree (skip having children) and earn a lot of cash.

Women won’t marry men who make less than them, so they die childless and alone.

But, hey! At least they got to make cool PowerPoints™ between boxes of chardonnay and the trip to the vet for Sir Buggles Von Fancypants. I’m not exaggerating. Check this out:

When you sold your family, soul, and children for Internet likes.

Did I mention this is ruining the economy, the family structure, and the future?

The good news (for me) is that I wrote my notes on this post, and I’ve only touched a third of them. That means probably the next two Wednesday posts will be around this theme.

The bad news is that there are two more posts. As much as I’d like to say the kids are alright, they’re most definitely not. This has tremendous impacts on the near-term economy, as well as the future of the West.

But, hey, at least Biden’s still Building Back Better!

Oh. That didn’t age as well as a cat lady.

Dunbar At The Fall Of Nations

“Dunbar, not Dumb Bear.” – Dances with Wolves

If beer makes you smarter, that didn’t work out for Budweiser®. (meme not mine)

People are funny. And I’m not talking, “John Wilder after fourteen beers at Chili’s when someone mentions that we’ll have to give up PEZ™ to meet CliMAtE ChAnGE GoALZ” funny. No, I’m talking about the way that we’re wired to react as people, and yet pretend we’re not.

Out of all of the aspirations of the way that we want to think about ourselves, there are some constants. Except for Mark Zuckerberg, we all need air to breathe. We all need food. We all need something to drink. I’ve heard some people drink water, but I keep wonder why they do that when mankind made civilization so we could have a nice beer.

The other thing most of us need is . . . people. Although everyone is slightly different, there seems to be something hardwired into us as to how we deal with people.

I told the doctor I didn’t trust him to stitch me up. He said, “Fine, suture self.”

Robin Dunbar (Grad student for Dr. Batman® Von Unterober) is a British Psychologist. He looked at the various sizes of primate brain, specifically the neo-ocasio-cortex. Er, just the neocortex. Sorry. The neocortex is the most recent delivery to the brain, and allows humans to do complicated things like talking, brewing beer, heating up frozen pizzas in the oven, giving each other chlamydia, and writing columns while drinking beer.

Dunbar sliced up a lot of primate brains, and compared the size of the neocortex to the size of the primate tribe. There was a correlation. Dunbar then said, “Hey, humans are primates, even though we are so very sexy, so what size would a human tribe be?”

His result based on math and brain size, and, I’m guessing a few pints of Guiness®?

Stable human tribe sizes should be about 150 based on Dunbar’s math, and this number is called Dunbar’s Number. I wrote about this before in this post (LINK) where I have the original (as far as I can see) hypothesis that some mental illnesses might have helped small groups survive back when we were killing mammoths to survive, and I write a bit more about Dunbar’s Number in that post.

My friend’s wife is leaving him because of mental illness. Or at least that’s what his cat told him.

This 150 person (let’s be generous and say it’s somewhere between 100 and 250) group size seems to show up wherever I look. Huge corporations may have tens of thousands of employees, but each of the actual operational chunks is small. Most that I’ve seen have been . . . less than 150 people. Even operating locations I’ve been to that have 500 people or more break down into groups. Office staff versus day shift versus night shift, or people who forgot their pants versus people who always remember them, or something similar.

Many folks might say, but Wilder, my country has hundreds of millions of people in it. Dunbar’s Number doesn’t seem to apply. Dunbar himself theorized that this number would only be exceeded when those groups faced extreme survival pressures, like invading Huns or women wanting to vote.

I’ll toss in a different theory here: larger groups than Dunbar’s number can exist when there’s a great degree of wealth that requires cooperation to maintain. My theory was (and is) that civilization was formed so we could make beer (LINK).

So why is it so big now?

How is Alexa® like my ex-wife? She tried to listen to everything and pretended to know it all.

Wealth, technology, and order allow Dunbar’s Number to get immense. If every small town in the United States has a McDonald’s®, then life gets simpler. We have built around an economic “sameness”. Similarly, people watch the same NFL™ teams or NCAA© college teams based on regions. This economic homogeneity is based on wealth and technology.

If you’re a fan of {INSERT SPORTS TEAM HERE} then if I’m a fan of the {SAME EXACT TEAM} we’re not so different, we’ve created a commonality. Dunbar’s Number is short-circuited, and a shallow trust is created.

But what happens when wealth (and the hope of having it) goes down?

I think we’re seeing it. Trust shrinks. People we once put inside our group are now put outside our group because the competition for resources increases. An example is probably in order: if everyone has a job and all of the PEZ™ and Hot Pockets© they want and big houses with swimming pools, having the odd illegal immigrant doesn’t bother them much. But when times get tight and jobs are scarce and Hot Pockets® cost $10 each, the “in-group” shrinks.

The Mrs. cringes every time I call them “Squat Pockets®”.

The greater the stress on the people, the smaller the group gets. Who do I trust? In my circles, it’s my family first. That number is small. Then my close friends – those that I know, based on experience, that I can trust. That number is bigger, but still pretty small. Then there are those who I have strong reason to trust. Then those in the neighborhood. Then . . .

Well, you can see, the tougher the situation, the smaller the circle. If we go back to our history, this is what we find – somewhere between 100 to 250 of us in a group trust each other, and can work as a group. When times are good, technology is in place, and the NFL® is playing that number can certainly be bigger.

I tend to think we’re past the point of Peak Dunbar. As things get tougher, you can see the friction already started as violence has escalated. As jobs disappear, and as hope disappears, this will increase.

But at least right now, I can still have fourteen beers at Chili’s™.

The Invisible Recession

“1000 points of light . . . recession bad, recovery good . . . I think I’ve got that.” – The Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell of Fear

If Dodge® makes an electric car, will they sell Dodge© Chargers™?

Inflation has really started to bite here in Modern Mayberry. I’m not sure about the Big Cities, but I’ve begun to notice it around here. Today at lunch I made a trip to McDonald’s®. It’s rare, most of the time (if I eat lunch at all) I eat at home. It’s more convenient, and I really, really hate lines, but this was a late lunch and I could drive straight to the window. But hey, for me, it’s the McChicken®.

The prices at McDonald’s® have gotten silly. Whereas there used to be enough value in a Big Mac™ to make one of them (occasionally) worth it, it’s just not the case nowadays. I didn’t spend too much time pondering the price on any of the burgers, since I could get nearly a pound of steak for the price of the average burger-fries-drink combos. But again, for me, it’s the McChicken™.

What a fun, cool, happening place, if you can get 3-for-free!

Why are people not going out?

The prices are silly.

I think (and I might be wrong) that our local McDonald’s™ just has to match the prices that are (more or less) nationally set by some sweaty accountant in Chicago wearing a Grimace™ costume and questioning the life choices that led him to have to report every day to Stacy, who is forced to wear a Hamburgler© costume. I can’t see the labor around Modern Mayberry costing nearly as much as in a bigger city. The food, I would imagine, costs exactly the same as in the bigger cities.

The result? I’ve noticed that the lines are much shorter at the local fast-food restaurants, even at peak hours. One of the regional chains hasn’t raised their prices, since all of their restaurants are just scattered around Upper Lower Midwestia and they don’t have to worry about the price of a Quarter Pounder™ in Manhattan. Their lines are the longest in town, so I follow Yogi Berra’s advice, “Nobody goes there anymore, that place is too crowded.”

Since COVID, my favorite local restaurant has closed. It was a bona fide restaurant, great service, great food. Supply chain issues coupled with labor oddities and lower business slowly torpedoed them. They liquidated before they lost a lot of money – they saw what was coming and wanted to go out on their terms.

I’ve been told that McDonald’s™ was sued once for bugs in their food. They won the case – no one on the jury believed they used any natural ingredients.

And our world got a little bit smaller, so we now have dinner somewhere else. It’s cheaper, but I notice that both of the places that we normally go aren’t very busy anymore. And the waitresses that work there aren’t changing jobs anymore – the good ones are keeping their jobs now. Something tells me they’re a little harder to get now.

So, if you’re counting restaurants and the people who work there (and those that used to own them) Modern Mayberry definitely has fewer restaurants. The revenue in the town might be the same, but there are (my guess) 20% fewer customers.

This is the invisible recession.

I always carry some McDonald’s® fries when I walk the dogs in winter. Fries go great with chilly dogs.

It’s invisible because I’d imagine that, even though McDonald’s® is (visually) selling less McFood©, they’re charging more. So, higher prices times lower volume is probably about even. But the value created to the consumer is far, far less even though revenues might be neutral. Unless you count eating healthier food than McDonald’s™ makes as value. Heck, Ronald has killed more people than Pennywise.

I suspect this is going on everywhere. Wages are certainly not keeping up with daily expenses, and those who are less fortunate haven’t had raises that have kept up with inflation. And why should employers pay more? In a recent month, a net 1.2 million jobs were “created” but 600,000 Americans lost their jobs. They were replaced by immigrants (illegal or legal).

Thankfully, corporate profits were saved!

It’s better than when he ran the farm using Artificial Intelligence and had to reboot it all before the power outage – AI, AI, Oh.

Interest rates are up, and I expect they will continue to go up because there is no semblance of any fiscal adulthood in Washington, D.C. on either side of the ball. The Democrat mantra of “spend more” is always followed by the Republican response of, “Well, okay, but not quite that much” as the dance of the destruction of the currency continues.

I hope I’m wrong, but this is based on the bet that politicians will continue to be weak and craven, and that 2024 is an election year. What do politicians like during an election year? A good economy with low inflation. Failing that, politicians like distractions and spreading money out like AOC on a Saturday night. If you can’t make a good economy, fake one.

More money floating around means . . . more inflation. But if wages aren’t going up because there’s a massive influx of illegals?

Just more misery, especially for those at the lower end of the pay scale. All of the typical Leftist voting blocks will be rewarded, of course. The standard Leftie professor at the average Leftie college (but I mostly repeat myself) will get raises because the Left takes care of itself and funds itself. The Left believes in the state and uses it as a propaganda and funding arm. Why do drama programs get special federal funds?

Because they vote Left.

I guess the finale was shot before a live audience.

But real Americans that aren’t tied into the ecosystem of government gimmes are seeing their difficulties multiply. Me? I’ll still mainly skip McDonald’s© and save a few bucks and have more steaks and fewer fries. But the invisible recession is already here, at least in Modern Mayberry.

But, hey, for me? It’s the McChicken™.

Mechanisms Of Control: Financial

“You must not take the Controller away. We will all die! The Controller is young and powerful. Perfect!” – Star Trek, TOS

Song lyric idea: “The Beautiful Sheeple, The Beautiful Sheeple . . .”

Currency started out innocently enough. If I wanted to sell my wheat and then buy some beer, well, I could trade my wheat to the brewer. But what if the brewer had all the wheat he needed, but needed, oh, hops? My wheat would do him no good. There is evidence of a guy making beer in the Bible, after all there’s a book in the New Testament named Hebrews.

I could try to trade my wheat to the guy who grew hops, but if he didn’t need any wheat, what was I to do?

The problem that currency solved was a simple one – how do I trade with someone who doesn’t need what I have? How can accountants get into amusement parks? How can ATF® agents do, well, anything since absolutely no one has any use for them?

The solution was some sort of medium of exchange. In one sense, it’s magic. As long as everyone believes, it works. When used judiciously (i.e., backed by gold on demand) it transforms into something that is hard to manipulate – what we’d call money.

How do you greet a German wheat farmer? “Gluten tag.”

When backed by nothing, (like now) it’s simply cash or currency.

The history of the last fifty years (and the last twenty, especially) has been the history of printing currency out of nothing and then giving it to a few small groups, and then they use the cash to buy up everything.

Once a group owns everything, there’s no reason for them to worry about profit: they already own all the things worth owning. That’s BlackRock©. The Aptly Named® Larry Fink runs it, and it’s no longer about profits, it’s about control based on his ideology.

What does Fink expect you to do when it’s cold? Huddle around a candle. What about when it’s freezing? Maybe then Larry will let you light the candle.

People (last I checked) still drive cars driven by sweet, sweet internal combustion engines. Those internal combustion engines (for the most part) require sweet, sweet crude oil to be turned into gasoline and diesel. Yeah, ethanol exists and so does biodiesel, but those can’t pull the load, and ethanol actively takes food out of the supply chain.

What if, however, the United Nations leaned on banks to get them to stop the supply of oil by choking off the supply of cash to oil producing nations?

If it wasn’t clear before, it should be clear now: it’s not about humanity or human rights – it’s about control.

Is the reason Saudi Arabia has so much money all the oil cash, or that they won’t let their women spend it?

Please don’t believe me, believe them when they say it. Here is the head of the Bank of International Settlement (BIS) saying that “central banks will have absolute control over all money (sic)”. This is in how each dollar (or whatever unit) is used, what people are allowed to buy, and what people are prohibited to buy.

Why do Central Bankers drive Ferraris®? Because you’re okay with a Fiat©.

One thing I know that they’d love to do is to make money evaporate to force people to spend rather than save. This can be done with electronic currency, and I expect they will do it to make sure that people can’t save and are forced to work every day of their lives.

Even more than now.

35% of Americans think they’ll max out at least one credit card this year.
38% are using their cards for expenses that they never used a card for.
62% are considering a “side-gig”, even if they already have a job.

-Fintech Times, July 25, 2023 (LINK)

Things are looking down for many Americans. When it comes to the point of using credit cards for financing life, it’s getting rough – I know, I was in that trap when I was in my 20s. I’ve seen it here in Modern Mayberry where the labor market is now getting tighter, and more people are looking for work. Employers can now be a bit choosier, which will put downward pressure on wages. The reason for this is simple: people aren’t going to McDonald’s®, they’re eating at home for half (or less) the price.

Another sign of control: in a recent month, 1.2 million “native or heritage”, (i.e., Americans actually born as Americans from American parents in America) lost their jobs. They were replaced by 600,000 immigrants. Low-cost labor is still being imported, and putting even more wage pressure on the middle and lower classes. The Biden administration even ordered that some of the gates in “The Wall” be welded open, which defeats the whole “wall” idea.

Looks like that Bill Gates was in charge of the wall, too. Look at all the Windows®.

To paraphrase William Jennings Bryant (among others), it is difficult to get a person to voice dissent when their next meal requires them to agree. That, then, is the nature of control of economic systems as demonstrated by BlackRock®, the BIS©, and the World Economic Forum™ – the desire is to make it so that the average person cannot resist without being kicked outside of the system that provides food, shelter, and the occasional luxury.

I’m sure it would be easy to start your own Central Bank . . . oh, maybe not.

Even that deal is in danger: the desire to dramatically change the way that people work and live is on the table for these groups. Who, exactly, do you think wants you to live in a pod and eat the bugs, and not own anything? Owning everything that matters isn’t enough – they want to own everything, and make your ability to have anything depending on you giving them all of yourself.

Even your thoughts.

And to think, all we really wanted was a beer. I guess it was pretty expensive.

Electric Cars and Rainbow Unicorns

“It’s logical to assume that something within this zone absorbs all forms of energy whether mechanically or biologically produced. Whatever it is, it would seem to be the same thing which drew all the energy out of an entire solar system and the Intrepid.” – Star Trek, TOS

Electric cars owners should never go down a dead end street – there’s no outlet.

As I have written time and time again, the future of energy is the future of humanity. Cheap, safe, limitless energy is the dream, and that energy is one component of a future that is not nasty, brutish, and short, like George Soros. Because the Leftists have tried to propagandize the subject, they’ve done a great job at muddling the thoughts on what in the end is actually the engineering question that drives the economic engines of the world.

Let’s remove the confusion on the term “energy source”. Electricity, for instance, isn’t an energy source, since it has to be created in some fashion, such as by windmill or coal-fired power plant, nuclear power plant, or tiny faeries hooked up to electrodes while being chained to beds in the basement of Disney® . . . oh, I’ve said too much.

I heard a fairy tale about politics once. It was Grimm.

Electric cars, then, are dependent upon getting their electricity from somewhere upstream. Electricity is an energy carrier, not a source.

On the other hand, crude oil is an energy source. The refining process doesn’t take up too much energy, and the sweet, sweet hydrocarbon molecules in a gallon of gasoline were there (mostly, some have been rearranged a tiny bit) in the refining process.

So, let’s define energy sources as energy, in crude, raw, or potential form that can be manipulated for use and that we get more energy out than we put into it. So, crude oil is definitely an energy source in most conventional and fracking situations, producing up to (depending on how you count it) sixteen times as much energy as used to get it out of the ground and turn it into 89 octane. I will say if we converted the entire economy to biofuels emissions would go down and we could starve at the same time!

Biofuels are entirely questionable, and most of them are poor when compared to gasoline as an alternative, returning just a little bit over break even for both biodiesel and corn ethanol. These products exist as fuels primarily because Lefties like ruining the economy and the RINOs know that farmers vote. Thus, there are tax incentives in place to force the use of biofuels.

“But we could make houses out of it.” “No, you have to bury it.” “But we could make furniture out of it.” “No, you have to bury it.” “But we could heat houses with it.” “No, you have to bury it.” “I’m beginning to think you don’t like people.”

The dream of the Left (at least this version, Arthur Sido has another one here: LINK), then is to get rid of all of the cars to replace them with “clean” electric vehicles. The International Energy Agency (IEA) wants to get electric cars and trucks (EVs) to 45% of the vehicles on the road by 2050 according to their Net Zero Scenario. 45%! The insanity doesn’t stop there – the IEA expects that alternative vehicles will reduce gas and diesel use by 30% by 2030 – seven years into the future.

That’s a stunning number, because the average age of a car in the United States is 12.2 years. I guess I’m pretty close to average, because the average Wilder fleet ages is 11.5 years. That means that the 30% of the car and stock in existence today needs to be replaced by 2030 with electric and hydrogen vehicles. I have no idea where the IEA is getting its dope, but they must get really good stuff.

>Be forest.
>Exist. Die. Kill mankind by raising temperature 0.0001°F.
>Wonder why this didn’t happen 100,000,000 years ago.

That would mean, though, that conventional vehicles that run on sweet, sweet oil and diesel will have to be phased out starting very soon. Further, the remainder of the vehicles the IEA are hydrogen-powered. Now the Hindenburg wasn’t hydrogen powered . . . .

Now, checking back to energy sources versus energy carriers, hydrogen is just an energy carrier. It has to be generated somewhere.

One of the first problems is that EVs are wickedly expensive compared to actual cars since they require massive amounts of material to replace the empty gasoline tank of an internal combustion car. The question is, where do those materials come from? If, all of a sudden, millions of EVs need to be made, the prices for the materials that go into them will go up, too.

>Be forest.
>Burn. Kill mankind by melting 200 gallons of ice.
>Wonder why this didn’t happen 200,000 years ago.

According to the IEA itself, demand for lithium alone will be 4,000% greater in 2050 than it is today. Cobalt increases would be 2,000%. The increase in availability alone is questionable. Resources show up in clumps – I can’t go in my front yard and look for gold, it is where it is. And when Leftists dream of this wonderful economy that they’re creating, they ignore the environmental costs waste of mining all this stuff – how much will that create in greenhouse gasses plant food?

It’s clear, once again, that these plans aren’t serious. China is producing a stunning 30% of greenhouse gasesCO₂, while the United States produces about 15% of human made CO₂. Why do we fixate on the United States?

First, Leftists have to pretend, really hard, that global warming climate change has replaced what real humans call weather.

Second? The Chinese are already communist, so let them do whatever. The people who have to have their economy ruined while they chase unicorns and rainbows rather than actual engineering solutions to actual engineering problems will have their economy destroyed.

Or maybe they’ll just buy beachfront property at a discount?

Or was that the plan all along?

At the beginning of this, I said the future of energy is the future of humanity. That’s just a bit inaccurate – the future of energy is the future of free humans and our economy. Me? I have my own plans.

Unfrozen Caveman Interview

“Hey, business is business. You use a gun, I use a fountain pen what’s the difference? Let’s put it in my terms: you’re in a hostile takeover, you snatch us up for some green mail, but you’re not expecting some poison pill to be running around the building, am I right?” – Die Hard

Sorry I edited out Worf. He was such a prima Dorn-a.

I’m here with my friend, Coroc. Coroc was frozen in an accident in the year 5000 B.C. which may or may not have been related to the first recorded time a man said, “Oh, yeah? Hold my beer.”

Coroc was thawed after his body was found while a construction crew was excavating the foundations for a McDonald’s® that was being built in Kharkov. Coroc has since gotten a degree from Harvard® Law and an MBA from Wharton© and has also killed an elk with a pocket knife in the parking lot of a Wendy’s™. I’ve asked him for an interview so I could get in a few questions about his unique experiences in dealing with business and economic situations.

John Wilder (JW): Coroc, I image the world is much different than when you were frozen into a block of ice near Kharkov 7,000 years ago. What’s the best new invention that you’ve seen?

Coroc IceBeer (CI): PEZ®. It is a light and fruity brick of flavor that explodes in your mouth like Magorthath’s axe explodes the skulls of his feeble enemies. It makes me laugh, but not too much, for that is womanly.

JW: Your last name is IceBeer. Did you have beer back then?

Coroc: If we didn’t have beer, there would have been many maidens left unplowed, if you know what I mean. So, yes. Beer is, how you say, awesome, although I can assure you we would not have had any of that Bud Light™. We would rather have consumed the flat body of a badger that had been walked on by many horses and then left out on the ground for a week.

A crying Möbius strip walks into a bar, crying. The bartender asks, “What’s wrong?” The Möbius strip says, “Where do I even begin?”

JW: Whoa, that escalated quickly! Let’s change the subject a bit. When dealing with a middle manager that didn’t give you the appropriate chance for advancement, what did you do back then?

Coroc: This happened many times. When a leader was too old or feeble, we would simply say, “You, you are not fit to lead! Go and gather berries with the women or I will split your skull with my axe.” Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

JW: What happened if you fought?

Coroc: Well, depends on if you win or lose. Lose? No problem, since you were dead. Win? No problem, since you took his women, took his hut, and took his things. Only a real problem if his women were named Karen.

JW: Sounds violent.

Coroc: Yes, it was the original hostile takeover.

I don’t like sweeping. Floors are beneath me.

JW: Did people ever not have jobs?

Coroc: No. Everyone had a job. Need someone to go hunt? Yes. We always needed that. Need someone to go and fight the idiot tribe next door that wouldn’t turn their music down after eleven? Yes, men needed. Need someone to fish and drink beer? Yes. Always needed.

JW: What if someone didn’t want to help out?

Coroc: I don’t understand. I already told you about the hostile takeover.

JW: Let’s shift gears. Here in 2023, we have a complex economy that uses electronic ledgers to keep track of the movement of goods and services and the payment from one country to another. This is enforced with many central banks working together to balance the flow of currency from one country to another. How did you do that, Coroc?

Coroc: Crom. I thought 7,000 years would have made you people smarter. In my time, in Scythia, we had horses. We had women. Fiery, lusty women with big manes of blonde hair, massive thighs that they could crack walnuts with. Strong, birthing hips. We rode our horses, took our axes, and made piece with other tribes.

JW: Don’t you mean “peace” instead of “piece”?

Coroc: No. They gave us a piece. Simple. And no problem with Human Resources, since we treated every tribe exactly alike. And there was no corporate debt to worry about.

What do you call a heavy metal band with financial problems? Megadebt.

JW: When it came So you didn’t have to worry about interest rates?

Coroc: The only interest I had was in the rate my enemy would die so I could hear the lamentation of his women. I think that was our major metric on our KPI, the relative volume of the lamentation of the women.

JW: What about your stock market?

Coroc: It was pretty stable. You can only eat so much steak per day. We kept a close eye on our stocks.

JW: What was your retirement like?

Coroc: Retirement meant, mostly, hanging out with the gods once you died in battle. It was a pretty good plan, leave 5% of your lootings in a plan, get 2.5% tribal match. And there was free healthcare! If you had poor health, we didn’t care. See? Free. Simple.

JW: So, were you ever plagued by guilt over your colonizer attitude?

Coroc: (Sadly) Yes, we were sometimes feeling guilty of our ability as colonizers. There are only so many men that we could use to fight, so our ability to conquer even the feeble toothless enemies we had was limited. Why, some years we would only vanquish a few kingdoms and petty princelings.

Is the sculptor of his statue a Khan artist?

JW: Was there much poverty in your tribe?

Coroc: We had a great poverty prevention program. It was called starvation. Worked wonders.

JW: Last question, what about inflation? Did your tribe ever see inflation?

Coroc: Only under one leader who tried to make smooth round rocks currency. Worked horrible, pretty soon everyone was strong, though, infinite amount of small round rocks back in Scythia, so it was great leg day.

JW: What happened to that leader?

Coroc: Hostile takeover.

The Great Rollover

“Like I told my last wife, I says, “Honey, I never drive faster than I can see. Besides that, it’s all in the reflexes.” – Big Trouble in Little China

I tried to buy a hamburger with cheese, but they wanted cash instead.

Yellow Freight® shut down. They had been around for 99 years, starting business way back in time when Bernie Sanders was trying to ruin Austro-Hungarian Empire or Bulgaria or wherever he came from.

Yellow Freight© was an old company and 30,000 people lost their jobs. What went on? Well, Yellow© borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars emergency ‘rona bucks. When they went bankrupt, they had an outstanding loan balance (backstopped by you and I) of $729.2 million. During the two and a half years that they’d had the loan, they’d paid down $54.8 million in interest. They’d also paid down $230 in principle.

Not $230 million. Not $230 thousand. $230, so I’m guessing their strategy was to pay it off at $10 a month, which would ensure that they’d pay off the loan in roughly the year 6,079,523.

Oddly, no one would take a risk on refinancing a company that had such powerhouse earnings, and so all of the people who used to have pensions with Yellow™ found out that their pension value would be paid out at the same rate as the loan was being paid out, and it’s pretty hard to split $10 among 30,000 people each month.

I hate to point fingers, but whatever executive thought orange was yellow just might be at fault.

Most of the 30,000 folks from Yellow Freight© will find another job – truckers are still in demand, and other companies have picked up the slack so far.

This isn’t the first. Just like the banks who had money in Treasury paper took a hit (Silicon Valley Bank®, I’d be looking at you if you were still here) because the “super-safe” bonds making 1% were worth a lot less when interest rates went up to 4%. The FDIC™ requires the banks that they insure to report data. It’s kinda scary when the FDIC© uses the X® (the social media company formerly known as Prince) to notify banks (and the American public) that banks might be in trouble again.

I guess no one is making them account for their problems?

The same thing is, perhaps, happening to the dollar itself – today lost its AAA bond rating from Fitch™ and is now producing AA bonds. Still a good rating, but it’s a big hit from “nearly perfect plus has nuclear missiles” and the first step to becoming a “drunk wine aunt country that can’t afford to take vacations”, like Uzbekistan.

As I’ve written before, it’s awesome to have “the reserve currency”, since that means you can print all the cash you want and spend it on things like iPods™ from China, Hello Kitty™ slippers from Bangladesh, and tequila from Mexico (what’s known as a “Hunter Biden Saturday Morning Special”). Losing it means a loss of that ability, and all of a sudden you have to work for all of that stuff rather than just printing cash.

Hunter Biden’s credit card company called him about suspicious activity. Seems that someone made a payment.

That’s difficult, because there’s always competition in having the reserve currency. One competitor, of course, is precious metals. Another is land. My father-in-law liked to say, “if it blows up, at least you still have the hole.” After the debt ceiling deal (translation: spend as much as you want until after the general election), the debt shot up, climbing $1.8 trillion in just two months. I mean, that’s a crazy number, we don’t even give that much to Zelenskyy in a year!

I know mortgage payments are going up, but just try telling a homeless person how lucky they are.

Eventually that has an effect on all assets. Although Darth Powell doesn’t exactly have the understanding of how home prices work, it is closer to say that at the same payment at a 7% mortgage rate, you can afford a heck of a lot less home than you can afford at 2.7%. Unless wages go up or BlackRock© decides to buy houses because they ran out of illegal aliens to import this month.

Or, if the bankers get absolute control over who uses what cash and when. That’s the goal. Will that happen if things are going well, and we’re surrounded by prosperity?

Of course not. In order to get control, the idea is chaos, uncertainty, war, and mayhem. If you’re old enough, how do the 2020s compare to the 1980s? The 1990s? The 2000s? In nearly every way that doesn’t involve ludicrously cheap televisions, each of those decades was objectively better. I’ve noted before that Peak USA probably hit somewhere before I was born to when I was a little kid.

Why do central bankers never travel together? They’re a bunch of loan wolves.

I’m normally a fan of the idea of ineptitude being responsible for at least being some contributing factor to the problems that we have, but when I look at the gross mismanagement of the economy for decades it almost seems like it’s planned.

But I’m sure I’ll hear Bernie lecturing us all that socialism and more government is the way out from the balcony of one of his three houses soon enough. After all, it’s worked out pretty well for him, what with him never having had an actual job and all.

You know, this costs money, but I’m just thinking of the joy of all of those people in India when they get unexpected packages.

Aliens: The Fakest Thing Ever?

“Crazy people can be very persuasive.” – The X-Files

Do werewolves live in warehouses?

I’ve enjoyed Scott Adams for years – the first time I saw his strips were on office photocopypasta in the 1990s where his brand of humor really hit home with folks at the place I was working. So, he’s an awesome cartoonist, and very funny. We’d say things like, “Dilbert’s just like me!” but then realize that we were in color and three dimensional.

Adams also picked Trump as a walk-in winner in 2016 way ahead of the crowd, but was dead wrong on the ‘Rona and the Vaxx®, so he’s not an oracle or a cult leader. But he does have interesting thoughts and I like reading him, and his podcast, while not good as mine, seems to have attracted a slightly larger audience.

So, when he tossed these Tweets® (or are they Xeets™ now??) up I thought I’d share them. Here are the rest:

I’ll admit, I’ve been fascinated by UFOs (the old name before they got fancy and started calling them UAPs) since I was a kid. I’ve been following the unfolding story since the “Tic-Tac®” videos came out in 2017 because any version of an answer for what was observed was interesting. Either the United States had amazing tech beyond anything, .gov is faking it, or it was something that fell into that big bucket of “aliens and demons and interdimensional beings – oh, my!”

Scott presents the idea that this subject is being brought up at the very moment that lots (and I mean a record number) of other things are brewing in the news:

We live in a nation at the brink of civil conflict,
White House Resident Joe Biden is facing a presidential scandal, with amazing evidence, that is the biggest since Watergate,
We might be seeing a soft coup against Biden right now as the Left wants to jettison him for someone else,
(Not anyone else, since no one wants Kamala),
Adding a janitor at Mar-A-Largo© to the list of people who are indicted along with Trump because he helped move boxes (really),
Hunter seems to have lost more cocaine,
Prices for luxuries like food have jumped, and are set to jump again as the Ukraine Conflict enters day 5,000, and
Payments for interest on the national debt are starting to be higher than Johnny Depp.

What’s the difference between Hunter Biden and his prostitutes? His prostitutes probably pay at least some taxes.

Is there something to distract us from? Yup.

Everything.

Why? Because that list above isn’t even close to being complete.

This is the danger. Scott describes it as a secret war, but I’m not sure that there are even two sides, since the FBI, CIA, and most other (but not all) organizations are tied back to supporting the Left.

I bought my ex a big diamond ring. She said, “Thanks, but we really need a new car.” Me: “But they don’t sell fake cars.”

So, is all this fake, the biggest and fakest thing ever?

I don’t know. It would make sense that it was. The Soviets Russians seem to have their “it’s all a lie” face on and China’s doing, well, whatever it is that China does when no one’s watching. Maybe hate-eating a box of Twinkies®?

And as we see all of the shiny, sparkly news going on, keep in mind the important things – your faith, your family, and your friends. There’s a lot of news that we get that we simply cannot do anything with, that for many of us is nothing more than a signal of what’s going on in the greater world.

We need to come together, find like-minded folks who share your values, and be ready for the changes that are coming in the world, because if they’re using aliens to distract us, well, they must be very scared indeed.

I’m glad that Hillary didn’t win, because then so many people would have moved to Benghazi, because at least there she’d leave them alone.

Don’t let it make you fret, and certainly don’t let it control your mood.

Because Scott is right from the standpoint that we have to keep living our lives, yet keep an eye out for the real story.

So enjoy that kitten while you can – they grow up so fast.